Elie Wiesel speaks to the media outside the White House in 2010.
Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

The Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel has died aged 87 at his home in Manhattan.

His friend Menachem Rosensaft and Israeli Yad Veshem research center confirmed the death on Saturday.

“My father raised his voice to presidents and prime ministers when he felt issues on the world stage demanded action,” his son, Elisha Wiesel, said in a statement. “But those who knew him in private life had the pleasure of experiencing a gentle and devout man who was always interested in others, and whose quiet voice moved them to better themselves.

“I will hear that voice for the rest of my life, and hope and pray that I will continue to earn the unconditional love and trust he always showed me.”

“There were so many dimensions to this unique, truly extraordinary individual,” wrote Rosensaft, general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, in a tribute published by Tablet magazine on Saturday.

Rosensaft remembered Wiesel as passionate and curious, intellectual and spiritual – an indefatigable crusader for conscience and learning.

“He abhorred bigotry of any kind, against Jews certainly, but with equal fervor if it was directed at any other group,” Rosensaft wrote. “He neither flaunted his Jewishness nor presumed to impose it on others. Rather he sought to explain its mysteries and to convey his love of the Jewish religion, of Jewish culture and tradition, of Jewish mysticism and Jewish mysteries.”

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Born in Sighet, Romania, on 30 September 1928, Wiesel became best known for his book Night, which drew on his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the final years of the second world war. Barely a teenager when Hungary annexed his town and forced its Jewish people into ghettos in 1940, Wiesel was then sent with his father to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland.

His mother and sister were killed in gas chambers. After a forced march to Buchenwald, his father, already suffering from dysentery, was killed by an SS officer’s beating.

Freed from the camp at 16, Wiesel moved to France with other Jewish survivors and became a journalist for French and Israeli papers in the late 1940s. He moved to the US in 1955 and became a US citizen in 1963. In the late 1950s he completed Night, which was translated into English in 1960. The book, which was turned down by more than a dozen publishers, became a perennial bestseller, selling an estimated 10m copies.

Wiesel completed more than 40 other books, including Dawn and Day, which also addressed the Holocaust. He married Marion Rose, another survivor, in Jerusalem in 1969, and wrote and lectured at universities including Yale, Columbia, Boston University and City University of New York.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter named Wiesel to the commission that created Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum, whose entrance bears his words: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

In 1985 Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, awarded Wiesel the congressional gold medal at the White House, where Wiesel denounced the president’s plan to visit a German cemetery holding the bodies of Nazi officers.

“That place, Mr President, is not your place,” Wiesel told him. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Wiesel confronted another president, telling Bill Clinton in 1993: “I cannot sleep for what I have seen” in the former Yugoslavia.

Barack Obama embraces Elie Wiesel as they visit the camp at Buchenwald near in the eastern German city of Weimar in 2009. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

“As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country!” he said. “People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.”

In 1986, the Nobel committee called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind”. He accepted the peace prize with characteristic grace.

“I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget,” he said in his acceptance speech, “because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.

“When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Wiesel was given an honorary knighthood by Britain, granted the rank of Grand-Croix in France’s Legion of Honor, and awarded the Israeli president’s medal of distinction.

In 2012 he returned a medal to Hungary, in protest against what he called the government’s “whitewashing of tragic and criminal episodes in Hungary’s past, namely the wartime Hungarian government’s involvement in the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish citizens”.

In the 2000s he continued his advocacy work, joining the actor George Clooney at the United Nations to speak about Darfur, signing a 2006 open letter with other Nobel laureates to denounce denial of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman empire, and continuing to speak out about repression in South Africa, Bosnia, Argentina and other countries.

He often returned to the theme of remembrance, traveling with Barack Obama and Angela Merkel to Auschwitz in 2009. On Saturday Obama called Wiesel “a living memorial”.

“He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry and intolerance in all its forms,” the president said in a statement. “He implored each of us, as nations and as human beings, to do the same, to see ourselves in each other and to make real that pledge of ‘never again”.’

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, called Wiesel a “master of words” in a statement released Saturday. “In the darkness of the Holocaust, Elie became a powerful force for light, truth and dignity.”

World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder called Wiesel “a beacon of light”. “He never slept. And he woke others when he saw injustice,” Lauder said. “Elie was at home everywhere, in the old world and the new world, in Yiddish, Hungarian, French, English and Hebrew.”

Wiesel is survived by his wife, a son, a stepdaughter and two grandchildren.